The 12-year-old boy died at a hospital, where he was taken by ambulance after he was shot by a police officer. The city of Cleveland wants Tamir Rice’s family to pay for his “last dying expense” — a $500 ambulance ride to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Some of you may remember the Kerner Commission, but many younger members of our audience probably will not. The Kerner Report should be required reading for policymakers and anyone trying to understand how we got to where we are now in terms of the black experience in America, the history of the ghetto and government’s responsibility to its citizens.

Long troubled and tenuous, the relationship between police departments and African-American communities is now toxic, and its repercussions may be most visible in the wounded eyes of black children. Since Brown’s death in August, scores of parents have brought their kids, some barely out of kindergarten, to protests nationwide and sparking discussions with them about racial profiling, police brutality, and the sad, but necessary refrain that “Black Lives Matter.”